Don McGowan, Bungie’s former general counsel (he held the position from 2020 to 2023), says that Sony has basically had enough of the bungling of the studio’s management…

McGowan took to LinkedIn to respond to what’s going on around Bungie (and it’s not the Marathon reboot, but that’s in the news today): “As much as it pains me to say this, it appears that Sony’s imposition of some discipline on my former colleagues has forced them to fix the things that were wrong with their game. To be clear, I’m not talking about the firings, I’m talking about forcing them to get their heads out of their asses and focus on things like: implementing a new player acquisition method; not just doing fan service for the fans in the Bungie C-suite; and running the game like a business. Good. I still have friends in that environment and I want them to keep their jobs.

This is the future I thought the company should have after the Sony acquisition: a studio, not an “independent company”. But there were a lot of egos for whom it was important to pretend that “nothing would change. I remember sitting there during the deal and saying, “Do you think Sony is characterizing this as them paying $3.6 billion for the right to have no say in what Bungie does? That was exactly what a lot of people were thinking. I think they were given a reason to understand that’s not how it works. Good. The changes described in this article are the things you do to run a franchise, not to keep making the game you and your friends mastered or to chase trends,” McGowan said.

Bungie has been having a lot of trouble with Destiny 2 lately, and he was responding to last week’s content structure announcement that the studio is moving away from annual linear story expansions in favor of smaller, more frequent updates to put more emphasis on repetitive action. The studio has been under Sony since 2022, and we’ve reported on two major waves of cuts since then.

McGowan says management failed. And it’s hard to argue with that!

Source: PCGamer, LinkedIn